1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus for recognizing a prescribed object, such as a face of a person.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, there is increasing necessity of security technology and processing of a large value of image information, and various kinds of techniques have been developed for identifying an individual person from an image of a face contained in image data imaged with a video camera or the like. Such a method has been known as a technique for identifying an individual person from a face image that characteristic points are extracted from a face image, and the characteristic points is verified with registered templates (as described in “Face Recognition by Elastic Bunch Graph Matching”, written by Laurenz Wiskott, Jean-Marc Fellous, Norbert Krouger and Christoph von der Malsburg, Proc. 7th Intern. Conf. on Computer Analysis of Image and Patterns 1997). Another method has also been known that pattern information representing a face is mapped to a space defined to enhance personal differences (as described in “Eigenfaces for Recognition”, written by Matthew A. Turk and Alex P. Pentland, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 71-86, 1991).